Tuesday, January 17, 2017

Among the very last photographs ever taken on the Moon, immediately following a third and final EVA at Taurus Littrow, December 1972, Harrison Schmitt captured a gritty, dusty Apollo 17 cmdr Gene Cernan, just after their retreat to the relative safety of their lander. Findings from the Apollo landings demonstrates the challenge presented by the course fineness of lunar dust to human and spacecraft health. Astronauts report the lunar surface material smelled a bit like ozone and gunpowder. Cernan, 82, passed away January 16, 2017 [NASA/JSC].

Thursday, November 17, 2016

Organizations Responding to NASA’s Lunar Payload RFI Who Book Their First Mission with Astrobotic, Will Get a Second Mission to the Moon for Free

Carolyn PacePittsburgh – Astrobotic announces today a historic, new dollar for dollar matching program that will provide free payload deliveries to the Moon. For every payload selected by NASA to fly on Astrobotic’s first mission, Astrobotic will provide an additional flight to payload providers on the company’s second mission at no charge. The second mission is currently scheduled to fly in 2021, and Astrobotic will match payload reservations up to $12 million. This new cost-sharing program is in response to the agency’s RFI call for small lunar surface payloads.

“For too long, NASA’s science and exploration programs were forced to operate in a one-and-done paradigm,” said John Thornton, CEO of Astrobotic. “Past missions to the Moon have unveiled incredible findings, but rapid follow up with additional measurement and observation was impossible. With this new public-private cost-share program, Astrobotic will speed up the pace of discovery.”

This matching program will provide scientists and engineers the opportunity to fly the same payload twice, or fly a new payload that takes advantage of findings from the first mission. This approach aligns with the nature of science and exploration investigations, which need follow-ups after new findings are uncovered.

“As the most advanced and credible lunar delivery company in the world, Astrobotic is thrilled to offer NASA and its payload partners a service that matches their needs and fundamentally improves how space science and exploration investigations get done,” said John Thornton.

This announcement comes as Astrobotic continues to work closely with its industry leading partners on the development of its Peregrine Lunar Lander. Astrobotic is the only lunar delivery company to have assembled a sophisticated and credible team of partners from the public and private sector. These partners include NASA, who is providing Astrobotic access to some of the best spacecraft engineers and facilities in the world, as part of NASA’s Lunar CATALYST Program; Airbus DS, who brings world-class spacecraft experience in human spaceflight and exploration and leverages previous lander development work with the European Space Agency; Aerojet Rocketdyne, who is supplying Peregrine’s propulsion system, featuring next generation space engine technology; and Deutsche Post DHL Group, the world’s leading mail and logistics company, who is the “Official Logistics Provider for Astrobotic’s First Mission to the Moon.”

HT: Clive Neal

[Astrobotic Technology is a lunar logistics company that delivers payloads to the Moon for companies, governments, universities, nonprofits, and individuals. The company’s spacecraft accommodates multiple customers on a single flight, offering lunar delivery at an industry-defining price of $1.2 Million per kilogram. Astrobotic is a partner with NASA through a Space Act Agreement under the Lunar CATALYST program, and has 22 prior and ongoing NASA contracts. The company has 10 payload delivery deals in place for its first mission and dozens of customer negotiations for upcoming missions. The company is also pursuing the Google Lunar XPRIZE with partner Carnegie Mellon University. Astrobotic was spun out of Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute in 2007, and is headquartered in Pittsburgh, PA.]

Wednesday, September 14, 2016

A new study of areas diametrically opposite from the Moon's youngest basins goes beyond crustal magnetic fields and swirl albedo features found at these focal points and proposes examples of highly modified terrain. Animation from preliminary lunar crust thickness maps prepared from GRAIL (2012) data by the Science Visualization Studio. [NASA/GSFC].

Joel Raupe

Lunar Pioneer

Studying the lunar magnetic anomalies and albedo swirls nested near the antipodes, at those points that are absolute opposite on the Moon from its youngest basins, can be a little disorienting. The antipodes of the two most familiar nearside basins Mare Imbrium and Mare Serenitatis, for example, are also near the mountainous northwest and northern border region of the vast (and more ancient) South Pole-Aitken (SPA) basin.

Such simple facts as these, derived during the relatively short history of modern lunar exploration, camouflage a variety of unknowns and complexities, as well as some controversy over the origin of the peculiar features discovered there.

Within ten degrees of the farside coordinates diametrically opposite from the officially designated center of Mare Imbrium, close to the surface, is a fairly well-known local magnetic field. Associated with this crustal magnetism is one of the Moon's most familiar tracings of delicate and bright albedo "swirls," apparently composed of a very thin layer of fine dust of the sort of low optical maturity, a signature of the Moon's youngest features draped over its oldest.

Like some kind of alien graffiti, these swirls really stand out as attributes of Mare Ingenii, the largest lava-flooded plain on the farside, a hemisphere almost as devoid of "seas" as the Moon's Earth-facing side is covered by them.

The Ingenii swirl fields are a highlight of anyone's tour of the Moon. To start considering these giant swirls traced over the surface of Ingenii as integral to Mare Imbrium on the Moon's nearside can sometimes seem like reading through a mirror.

Mare Imbrium is probably the most easily detected 'naked-eye feature' of the tidally-bound Earth-facing hemisphere. Centered officially by the IAU at 34.72°N, 345.09°E, the corresponding, though still preliminary, antipode for the Imbrium basin should be near 34.72°S,165.09°E, on the farside's southern hemisphere.

The antipode of Mare Imbrium (yellow spot) was a foci of conjoining seismic shock and ejecta from the epoch-changing basin-forming impact that hollowed out Mare Imbrium, roughly 3.85 billion years ago. Persistent bright surface markings that have lasted beyond the 800 million to 1 billion years thought to inevitably darken lunar regolith are thought to be the result of a cyclical interaction of charged lunar dust precipitating through the locally intense magnetic field. The white rectangle outlines one of many areas of disrupted terrain, "material of grooves and mounds" identified on the geological map of Stuart-Alexander (1978). LROC Wide Angle Camera (WAC) monochrome mosaic [NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University].

When we think of the clusters of features often found together near these points directly opposite from the Moon's nearside basins it's often easier to label Mare Ingenii as Imbrium Antipode, and the Gerasimovich region as Crisium Antipode, etc.

This unconventional labeling emerges as we study a whole family of, literally, "far-flung phenomena," though most of the species, fortunately, are not yet associated with a local name. Unlike the more easily spotted features at Mare Ingenii, now thought to have originated with Mare Imbrium, such features elsewhere are less easily picked out, overlapping widely differing terrains and a variety of mountain ranges, plains and crater groups.

A very distinctive bifurcated swirl, one of many similar, striking aspects of Mare Ingenii, on the Moon's farside and immediately adjacent to the antipode of Mare Imbrium. From an oblique LROC NAC observation M191830503R, LRO orbit 13304, May 16, 2012 [NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University].

The point on the Moon opposite Mare Serenitatis is not as distinctive (see image below). The coordinates were easy enough to determine, like the Imbrium Antipode it's just inside the circumference of SPA basin, a little north and east the antipode of Imbrium as Serenitatis basin, on the nearside, is a little south and east of Imbrium.

Like most of the farside, however, there is no mare-inundated plain near the Serenitatis antipode to allow for a clear photographic contrast with local differences in albedo. The crustal magnetism (or the granularity of our data) seems more diffuse, with smaller, less intense knots of crust magnetism.

The absence on the Moon of the kind of global magnetic field that affords life so much welcome protection here on Earth was one of the earliest conclusions of modern lunar exploration. As men and machines transited to and from the surface, however, the magnetic picture became more complex. The earliest magnetometers, in orbit and on the surface, were detecting magnetic signatures bound to local features, but their local intensity and apparent close association of with surfaces that seemed to defy aging were only beginning to be grasped.

The Serenitatis Antipode is not as easy for the naked eye to pick out from the background as points opposite the Imbrium basin associated with Mare Ingenii. The antipode of Serenitatis is marked with a cross in frame one (Figure 5 from the study by Hood, et al (2013). In that same frame the authors draw attention to mountains along the rim of SPA basin (white arrows) as possible examples of terrain disrupted by the Serenitatis basin-forming impact here near the opposite point on the Moon. The frame following draws attention to two anomalous optically immature surface areas within Galois Q crater, followed by Clementine color ratio analysis where the older terrain (red) surface areas stand out with characteristics of new (blue) and reflective regolith fines. The twin patches coincide with a local magnetic field strength "bump" measuring 9nT. The final frame shows the same albedo patches at 77 meters resolution in LROC Wide Angle Camera (WAC) observation M160959807C (604 nm), spacecraft orbit 8854, May 25, 2011, angle of incidence 62° from 60 km [NASA/USGS/DOD/GSFC/Arizona State University].

As the Apollo era came to an end it was understood, at least, that the Moon seemed once to have had an internal dynamo like Earth, generating global magnetism fossilized today in its rocks. A higher resolution picture of the Moon's magnetism and its interrelation with the Sun, Earth and its own dust would wait for a second very slowly renewed period of unmanned exploration beginning with vehicles like the DOD remote sensing test platform Clementine (1994).

At the close of the 20th century the remarkable Lunar Prospector (1998-1999) helped add important pieces to the picture. Specifically, the small vehicle returned highly valued data on the Moon's local magnetic fields very close to the surface, as it was gradually lowered toward a planned impact within the permanently shadowed Shoemaker crater, a feature of the far lunar south today baring the name of the celebrated pioneer Gene Shoemaker (1928-1997) who originally planned the impact that inspired the LCROSS mission ten years later.

Investigators have continued to correct and tease valuable information from the sparse Lunar Prospector magnetometer data to this day. The data sometimes allowed identifying lunar features in a manner opposite than before. Reiner Gamma, the most familiar swirl phenomena in Oceanus Procellarum, stands out in low power telescopes. Its associated crustal magnetism was identified later. Elsewhere on the nearside magnetometer data from as few as one to three late mission low orbital passes by Lunar Prospector allowed diffuse albedo patches at Airy and Descartes to be definitively associated with locally intense crustal magnetism and identified as true "swirl phenomena."

Simulated oblique view over ancient Descartes crater (29 km - 11.74°S, 15.66°E), from the Cayley Formation plains explored by Young and Duke on the Apollo 16 expedition (1972) in the northwest around 80 km southeast over the "disrupted terrain" of the Descartes Formation, highlighting its anomalous albedo, not coincidentally at the heart of one of the Moon's most intense crustal magnetic fields. LROC WAC mosaic, from observations collected in three sequential orbital passes December 3, 2011, averaging 52 meters resolution from 38 km - Figure 5 from "Boulder 668 at Descartes C," July 17, 2012 [NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University].

At Orientale Antipode, opposite from what is the Moon's unequivocally youngest basin, the swirl field is very widespread, associated with more than a few peaks in local crustal magnetism. The largest affected feature on the opposite side of the Moon from Mare Orientale is Mare Marginis, characterized by what is likely the Moon's largest and most complex field of swirls at the surface, overlapping every kind of terrain, but also closely identified with the Goddard and Goddard A crater. Still, the actual boundaries of this field of 'persistent albedo patterns' are difficult to trace.

Adding to this complexity, the swirl field near Orientale Antipode has been affected by relatively recent impacts, some with brightly reflective rays. The field is spread far enough east, extending over the farside's mid-latitudes, it's difficult to say with certainty whether an unnamed, tightly wound spectacular swirl field east of Firsov crater belongs to the group.

The Orientale Antipode (near Goddard A) is characterized by very widespread swirls. The greater manifestation (large oval) extends far from the pronounced magnetic field lines of peak strength near Hubble, Goddard and Goddard A craters east nearly to a distant and weaker peak field strength associated with the spectacular field of swirls seemingly spilling out from a bright unnamed Copernican crater east of Firsov (4.204°N, 112.697°E). LROC WAC global 100 meter mosaic [NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University].

Three investigators with established planetary science resumes which include (among many other things) peer-reviewed study of these bright swirl 'patterns' and associated lunar magnetic anomalies, have recently authored a new study building on continued fine-tuning of Lunar Prospector (1998-1999) magnetometer data and the more recent Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) Wide Angle Camera (WAC) surveys.

The new paper, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, “Origin of Strong Lunar Magnetic Anomalies: More Detailed Mapping and Examination of LROC Imagery in Regions Antipodal to Young Large Basins,” demonstrates further the recent end to a long controversy, helping answer the Space Age mystery posed by the Moon’s delicate, bright, often sinuous surface albedo patterns.

A crew member on-board Apollo 10 almost managed to capture the full length of the magnificent but unnamed surficial albedo swirl field now associated with a measurable peak in crustal magnetism east of Firsov crater. AS10-30-4365 [NASA].

As with most controversies on the long climb of science, a quiet resolution drew upon bits and pieces collected in pursuit of answers to many, often unrelated, questions.

Launched in early 1998, Lunar Prospector spent 19 months in a low polar orbit and became notorious for a remarkably low budget and high return of valued data as much as for improved mapping of the scattered neutron absorption strongly hinting at the presence of volatiles, specifically hydrogen, prematurely ruled out following early analysis of Apollo samples in 1969.

In 2013 terms, for the amount of money the federal government collects, borrows and spends every eight and a half minutes Lunar Prospector gained a well-deserved reputation and confirmed still skeptically-received indications of the presence of hydrogen, both inside and outside the permanently shadowed regions of the Moon’s polar latitudes.

“Will your grace command me any service to the world's end? I will go on the slightest errand now, to the Antipodes that you can devise to send me on…”

- Much Ado About Nothing, (Act II, scene 2)

The planned mission-ending impact of Lunar Prospector on the permanently shadowed floor of Shoemaker crater, near the Moon’s South Pole, July 30, 1999 (a long-shot, ultimately unsuccessful attempt to send up a plume of volatiles detectable from Earth), inspired the very successful LCROSS mission, launched together with LRO, a decade later.

With its neutron spectrometer, mapping the absence, the absorption, of scattered neutrons indicative of hydrogen, possibly water ices, near the lunar poles, Lunar Prospector also deployed a sensitive magnetometer.

The Moon’s lack of an Earth-like global magnetic field was well known, though Apollo and Luna surface samples clearly indicated the Moon may once have had the kind of molten internal dynamo at its core we take for granted on Earth, a now-dormant generator sufficient for global magnetism, its signature locked into the lineup direction of certain materials as volcanic rock cooled in its earliest ages, some of these as much as a billion years apart. The magnetic fields detected at the surface and from orbit, speculation held, were likely fossilized remnants, surviving islands – though the presence of “lunar magnetic anomalies” on the Moon’s Farside, in concentrations near opposite on the Moon (antipodal) from the Nearside’s large basins was seen as an unlikely coincidence very early in post-Apollo studies.

Along with anomalous local crustal magnetism detected near the Moon’s most famous “swirl,” the alluring Reiner Gamma, bright against the darker background of Oceans Procellarum, and the presence of swirls, some of them spectacular, in vicinity of these islands of knotted magnetic field lines - at the antipodes of Mare Imbrium and Serenitatis - was impossible to ignore.

Very near the Antipodes of Mare Imbrium in particular, the earliest photographs of the Moon’s Farside unveiled a spectacular swirl “field,” seeming almost intelligent in origin, Minimalist butterflies or spiders, strange forms seemed lightly painted in white on the darker floor of the melt-inundated basin floor of Mare Ingenii, by some inscrutable giant almost evoking the walls and ceilings of the cave of Lascaux, or the Nazca Lines.

“Swirls” seem immune from “optical maturity,” an inevitable darkening (really reddening) by solar and cosmic radiation. Incessant bombardment should inevitably weather fade such contrast to match its surroundings, on a timescale between 800 million to 1 billion years.

Had there had been any indication the bright patterns were composed of rough, fresh and reflectively bright small ejecta, like the rays of young 109 million year old Tycho, for example, a predictable cycle of meteorite and micro-meteorite “gardening” turns over the upper 3 centimeters of the entire lunar surface each two million years. Space weather, therefore, should have contributed to their erasure. It was a strong argument for direct, or lacking any difference in the crater counts inside and outside the swirls, indirect encounters with comets.

The comet encounter theory for the origin of lunar swirls died hard. Proponents pointed to the optical immaturity, the undeniably fresh material of the brighter surface, and claimed this to be evidence that outweighed other factors.

The predominance of Farside swirls gathered near places opposite from the Nearside basins and in the presence of coincident local crustal magnetism, they wrote, pointed perhaps to relatively recent and oblique encounters with comets interacting electro-chemically with these unusual conditions. The still-interesting fact that Reiner Gamma, and two lesser known magnetic anomalies with accompanying bright albedo patches on the Nearside seemed to lack any identified basins at their opposing antipodes on the Farside, they claimed, was also exceptional.

As the recorded readings measured from the Lunar Prospector magnetometer were gradually corrected, properly matched with time, the pressures of sunlight, etc., over many years following the end of that mission in 1999, researchers began discovering, or confirming, the existence of swirls after first deciphering the location of smaller, though sometimes intense, magnetic fields.

Ironically, the most intense magnetic field detected by any of the Apollo surface expeditions, that of Apollo 16, was measured only 80 km northwest of possibly the most intense crustal magnetism on the Moon, together with the amorphous small brighter surface material of the Descartes Formation. John Young and Charlie Duke walked on the northwestern edge of this feature when sampling the Cinco craters on “Stone Mountain,” overlooking South Ray crater, in April 1972.

The Lunar Prospector magnetometer survey of the Moon made for an improvement on earlier maps, but the mission was not comprehensive. Its advantage, at the time, was an unprecedented low orbit, an orbital altitude gradually lowering more and more as the vehicle approached its demise. The data had an inherent high degree of accuracy because of improvements in electronics and hardened electronics since the Apollo era, and a value-added accuracy due to the patience and hard work of investigators properly pegging the to geography and time, in filtering out the noise long after Lunar Prospector was gone.

Much of what is now known about the lunar magnetic anomaly on the Descartes highland hugging the northern edge of ancient Descartes crater, was teased from its measurements taken through three late mission orbits, when Lunar Prospector orbited some 32 km first over the east, and in the next orbit passing directly over Descartes, and last over the west.

Hood and Richmond, authors of this latest study, published their examination of the Lunar Prospector encounter with Descartes in 2003, determining the intensity of the very local magnetic field sufficient to refract the solar wind, dubbing it a “mini-magnetosphere.”

At nearly the same time, similarly strong local magnetic anomalies, though slightly less intense and localized, were shown embedded on the Farside at Gerasimovich, and perhaps elsewhere.

Some were quick to speculate, if a crustal magnetism centered on the Descartes formation were strong enough to refract the solar wind, perhaps such protection prevented the dusty surface of the bright “swirl” on the southern half of “Stone Mountain” from becoming “optically mature.”

The authors were quick to point out in their introductory paper even such an obviously intense local magnetic field offered no protections from heavier cosmic radiation. The depth of the cavity in the solar wind formed by Descartes magnetic anomaly was insufficient to stop highly energetic, and heavy, nucleons traveling – unlike the particles of a solar wind – close to the speed of light. They estimated such a purpose would require a magnetic field 2,000 km across just to begin deflecting highly energetic cosmic rays away from the surface within the fields. Naturally, such a field would have no effect on the patient and steady rain of micro-meteorites adding to the surface maturity.

Ignoring, for the moment, most magnetic anomalies with their attendant swirls are not sufficiently intense to carve out a transitory cavity in the solar wind, the authors demonstrated the most astonishingly enduring, and intense magnetic field ever detected near the lunar surface was no protection from space weathering.

By all rights, the surfaces within their influence should be darkening at or close to the same rate as the lunar surface elsewhere.

Enter Kaguya, Chandrayaan, LRO…

Toppography.

For decades the nature and the origin or the swirl patterns stirred very minor controversy, in planetary science communities. Those who insisted lunar swirls originated from comet encounters

Early in the Space Age investigators concluded our Moon, unlike Earth,

One place suggested as a possible location for samples of the SPA basin is northeast of Plato, where, between that famous crater and the long northern edge of Mare Frigoris, probability points toward the possible existence of a debris pile, the antipodes of the South Pole-Aitken basin.

In this latest study, Hood, Richmond and Spudis add granularity to our understanding the relationship between basin forming impacts and how they modify the landscape at the most remote points possible, as far away from Ground Zero as anyone can get, and remain on the Moon.

Anyone can meditate on Mare Imbrium, for example, and see how energetic the pressure wave, racing away from the center of the impact, scoured out mountains and channels and hurled away and dumped unimaginable masses of melt and solid debris many hundreds of kilometers away. The scar has not been erased, and a significant amount of debris must have been ejected at escape velocity. Much of that material eventually returned or settled elsewhere in the Solar System.

On February 15, 2013, as many in the far-flung world’s astronomy community were preparing to observe an exceptionally close fly-by of asteroid 2012 DA14, out of the glare of the pre-dawn over Central Asia a 7,000 ton, 15 meter-wide rock encountered Earth’s atmosphere at a relative speed of 18 km per second. Immediately flaring bright, it quickly exploded 20 km overhead. The event produced a shockwave into the atmosphere over Chelyabinsk that immediately imparted ten times the energy of the fission bomb exploded over Hiroshima in 1945. The sound of that smaller asteroid’s explosion traveled around the entire planet several times before seismic stations of the world could detect it no longer.

The pressure wave from the Chelyabinsk Event propagated in every direction away from the explosion until all points on the wave converged west-southwest of South America, where the far South Pacific borders the Great Southern Ocean encircling Antarctica. The momentum of the wave through the atmosphere carried past this convergence point, the Antipode of the Chelyabinsk Event, and continued racing away until a second convergence occurred many hours later, back over Russia, where the energy continued on toward the antipode a second time, and so on, like ripples in a pond – only the pond, in this case, was a planet, and its shoreline a single point on the opposite side of the world.

There's gold in them thar asteroids – also iron, nickel, copper and, most valuable of all, water. According to the proponents of asteroid mining, these space rocks are a virtual El Dorado in the sky with more obtainable minerals in the largest three in our solar system than on the entire Earth. The question is, where exactly is all this mineral wealth and how do you get it without going broke in the process?

There's something of an international race to the asteroids underway at the moment, with countries from the United States to Luxembourg backing missions. On the surface it seems like a two-tier race – NASA and ESA are sending giant spacecraft and even manned missions, while private firms are concentrating on tiny probes that look like scale models. But while these approaches to asteroid exploration are very different, they are far from mutually exclusive.

Before we examine these exploration plans, let's look at the asteroids and why anyone would be interested in spending billions to visit a far flung rock.

Wednesday, August 3, 2016

For the first time ever, a private company has permission to land on the moon.

The U.S. government has officially approved the planned 2017 robotic lunar landing of California-based Moon Express, which aims to fly commercial missions to Earth's nearest neighbor and help exploit its resources, company representatives announced today .

"This is not only a milestone, but really a threshold for the entire commercial space industry," Moon Express co-founder and CEO Bob Richards told Space.com.

Previously, companies had been able to operate only on or around Earth. The new approval, while exclusive to Moon Express, could therefore serve as an important regulatory guide for deep-space commercial activity in general, Richards said.

"Nobody's had a deep-sea voyage yet. We're still charting those waters," he said. "Somebody had to be first."

Moon Express submitted an application to the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) on April 8. The document then made its way through the U.S. State Department, the U.S. Department of Defense, NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Federal Communications Commission, Richards said.

Monday, March 21, 2016

Right now Washington, DC’s museums are filled with the noise of hormonal teenagers on their spring break trips to the nation’s capital. They run around aimlessly, oblivious to their surroundings, or sprawl on the dirty carpet absorbed in their own little worlds. Later, in May, the senior class trips will show up, and those older students are a little less noisy, a little more focused, but they too will probably not be all that interested in the actual museums, even if they take their noses out of their cellphones for more than a second or two. But just maybe, perhaps, one or two of them may accidentally wander into one of the National Air and Space Museum’s new exhibits and they might quiet down for a moment and see something both familiar and alien.

The exhibit is titled “A New Moon Rises” and it is a display of large format photographs from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter featuring the Moon in all its panchromatic glory. You could look at most of these photos on your computer screen, but seeing them enlarged and displayed on a museum wall like works of art is an entirely different experience.

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO, was launched in 2009 and has been chugging away ever since. If nothing breaks, in four or five years the spacecraft will probably run out of fuel and, because the Moon’s gravity field is uneven, it will ultimately fall and silently crash into the surface after more than a decade in orbit.

Friday, March 18, 2016

Tuesday, February 16, 2016

Photographer James Burns has spent the past year capturing various lunar spectacles in London. Some of the result is part of thirteen images posted in a London Evening Standard slideshow, HERE [james Burns@London_Rooftops].

Liz Connor and Gareth Richman

From September’s supermoon rising to the magnificent lunar eclipse, photographer James Burns captures some of the most breathtaking states of the moon over London.

His Lunar London project emerged after various evenings of photographing the capital’s skyline led to a string of chance encounters with the moon.

“I had a growing fascination with how I could capture it in the same way I had been the shooting the rising and setting sun for some years”, James told the Evening Standard.

“2015 was a lucky year for moongazing in London. Despite cloud cover across most of Europe, September's supermoon lunar eclipse was visible in perfectly clear skies over London and was an otherworldly joy to behold.”

Monday, February 15, 2016

Artist conception of the proposed Moon USA resort and entertainment complex in Coachella Valley near Indio, California.Renderings courtesy of Moon World Resorts, Inc. feature at laist.com.

Danny Jensen

laist.com

Dust off your moon boots because a Canadian developer is aiming to build a $4 billion, five-star lunar resort, known as Moon USA, in the city of Coachella, just down the road from where the music fest is held in Indio. That kind of awesomeness is obviously what has been missing from all of our lives.

Friday, February 12, 2016

Why is a team from the tiniest country in the Middle East joining an international race to the moon?

It’s not just the promise of a Google Lunar XPRIZE of $20 million to the first team (and $5 million to the second team) that lands an unmanned spacecraft on the moon by December 31, 2017, and then moves it 500 meters across the lunar surface as it sends high-definition images and videos back to earth.

The Israelis’ participation has much to do with a cultural passion to accomplish the seemingly impossible. It also is fueled by a desire to make history, inspire Jewish pride, and encourage more young people to pursue careers that will sustain Israel’s leading position in the high-tech world.

Still image from YouTube video detailing the SpaceIL ballistics. the Israeli team intends to utilize graduated orbital phases to attain increasing apogee in graduated stages, similar to the polar orbit method previously employed by both ESA and the ISRO. The team has chosen the Reiner Gamma swirl and magnetic anomaly north of the lunar equator in Oceanua Procellarum as its eventual landing site.

“Only global superpowers with billion-dollar space programs — the United States, Russia, and China — have soft-landed a rover on the surface of the moon,” said SpaceIL’s CEO, Dr. Eran Privman, last October, when SpaceIL became the first Google Lunar XPRIZE (GLXP) team to sign a verified launch contract for a privately funded mission to the moon.

On February 17, Yonatan Winetraub — one of three young Israeli engineers who founded the nonprofit organization SpaceIL in 2010 to enter the GLXP competition — will speak about the ambitious project at Rutgers University in New Brunswick.

Thursday, February 11, 2016

Hat Tip to gamershell.com for news of "Lunar Survival," a "first-person survival adventure game with horror elements," developers frankly admit is barely 'a work in progress.'

"The gameplay is designed as a combination of survival-action, map quests, realistic Apollo mission technologies and various Moon mysteries. Players will need to take in consideration of the different technical aspects to pass missions, such as the amount of oxygen, electricity, stamina and the space suit temperature. Players will be able to repair, fix and build different mechanisms and upgrade their suit which will help them to spend more time on missions without coming back to the Lunar Space Module to recover."

Interesting how the concept Surveyor artifact features artfully edged and updated landing pods.

Perhaps someone in the community could help the developers out.

They might begin with the amazingly stubborn 'dark side and light side of the Moon' fallacy, before these guys embarrass themselves repeating what every Pink Floyd fan has accepted as false since 1973.

Some will laugh at the early stage vaporware feel to this concept, which seems to borrow heavily fromApollo 18(2011),

Is it possible they totally missed that movie? Of course it is.

Still this game's development is, at least, claimed to be 'in progress' and is, therefore, making a better pace than Congress, for example

Sadly, none of this raises any hope that search results, using YouTube especially, will soon start to separate science from urban legend for those using criteria that includes 'NASA' or 'Apollo.'

Saturday, February 6, 2016

Edgar Mitchell, sixth human to visit the lunar surface, takes a live panorama of the close horizon using the first color television camera successfully operated on the Moon; at Fra Mauro, south of Copernicus, February 1971. Photograph by Apollo 14 commander Alan Shepard [NASA/JSC].

Astronaut Edgar Mitchell, lunar module pilot on Apollo 14, passed away Thursday in West Palm Beach, Florida, and on the eve of the 45th anniversary of his lunar expedition in 1971.

Mitchell joined Apollo 14 commander Alan Shephard, Jr., the first American in space, in the lunar module Antares, which touched down February 5, 1971, in the Fra Mauro highlands. Shepard and Mitchell were assigned to traverse the lunar surface to deploy scientific instruments and perform a communications test on the surface, as well as photograph the lunar surface and any deep space phenomena. It was Mitchell’s only spaceflight.

Mitchell and Shephard set mission records for the time of the longest distance traversed on the lunar surface; the largest payload returned from lunar surface; and the longest lunar stay time (33 hours). They were also the first to transmit color TV from the lunar surface. Mitchell helped collect 94 pounds of lunar rock and soil samples that were distributed across 187 scientific teams in the United States and 14 other countries for analysis.

Tuesday, January 19, 2016

The highly-economical science probe Lunar Prospector mated to the payload assist module prior to launch in 1998. The man-sized tran-lunar ejection module (Bottom) may have made a fiery return to Earth, last year [NASA].

Traci Watson

NATURE

The piece of space junk that made a fiery plunge into the Indian Ocean two months ago was most likely the remains of a rocket motor that propelled a NASA probe to the Moon in 1998, researchers studying the event have concluded.

The junk’s identity is by no means certain, but the “leading candidate” is the translunar injection module of Lunar Prospector, says Paul Chodas, an asteroid tracker at the CalTech/Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. The module nudged the probe out of Earth orbit and then detached from the main spacecraft, which orbited the Moon for 19 months before it was deliberately slammed into the lunar south pole in July 1999.

Speculation about the source of the debris, known as WT1190F, ran rampant even before it plummeted through the atmosphere on 13 November. The only artificial object to make an uncontrolled re-entry at a precisely predicted place and moment, it presented a unique chance to witness such an event in real time. Researchers took advantage of the opportunity, monitoring the debris from a chartered jet as well as from ground-based observatories.

Thorium concentrations in ppm, among the many elemental maps gather from data collected during the pioneering and economy-driven Lunar Prospector mission over its eighteen months in lunar orbit in 1998 and 1999 [Spudis/NASA].

European Space Agency's head Jan Woerner released the vision outline for the Moon Village, which could replace the International Space Station as early as 2030. The lunar village will be composed of structures created by 3D printers and robots using Moon dusts as raw materials.

Woerner became the ESA head in July 2015 and made the Moon mission the space agency's central project. Woerner added that this lunar project is a crucial step towards the future flight to Mars.

"I looked into the requirements I see for a project after ISS. As of today, I see the Moon Village as the ideal successor of the International Space Station for [space] exploration," said Woerner.

The Moon Village project could be a collaboration of several nations and space exploration groups including Russia, China, NASA and ESA. Experts around the world could contribute advanced technology, knowledge and even manpower (astronauts) for the Mars mission preparations. The same can be done for the ongoing biology and physics explorations that are currently being conducted onboard the ISS.

In 2014, the U.S. announced they intend to keep the ISS in operation until 2024, which pushed back the station's retirement by at least four years. Several European nations raised concerns over the extended operation's perceived costs, challenging if the extension would be worthwhile. On the other hand, Russia is considering the option of building its own space station.

Wednesday, October 14, 2015

Explanation: Is there anything interesting to see in the direction opposite the Sun? One night last month, there were quite a few things. First, the red-glowing orb on the lower right of the original image is the full moon, darkened and reddened because it has entered Earth's shadow. Beyond Earth's cone of darkness are backscattering dust particles orbiting the Sun that standout with a diffuse glow called the gegenschein, visible as a faint band rising from the central horizon and passing behind the Moon. A nearly horizontal stripe of green airglow is also discernable just above the horizon, partly blocked by blowing orange sand.

Wednesday, August 5, 2015

This animation features actual satellite images of the far side of the moon, illuminated by the sun, as it crosses between the DSCOVR spacecraft's Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC) and telescope, and the Earth - one million miles away [NASA/Goddard].

Friday, June 26, 2015

Artist's conception of the lunar dust exosphere surrounding the moon. The color represents the amount of material ejected from the surface, showing a peak in the apex direction. A haze of dust is shown around the moon. Gray faded circles are overlaid on the lunar surface to represent the random nature of the primary impactors. An artist's conception of the LADEE orbital inclination is also shown [UC Boulder/Daniel Morgan/Jamey Szalay].

Darryl Waller

Sharon Lozano

NASA Ames

New science results from NASA’s LADEE mission (Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer) indicate the Moon is regularly engulfed in a permanent, but lopsided and transitory, dust cloud increasing in density during encounters with cometary debris, like those producing the Geminids, according to a new study led by University of Colorado Boulder.

"Knowledge about the dusty environments in space has practical applications," said CU-Boulder physics Professor Mihály Horányi. "Knowing where the dust is and where it is headed in the solar system could help mitigate hazards for future human exploration, including dust particles damaging spacecraft or harming astronauts."

The cloud was discovered using data from a detector on board LADEE called the Lunar Dust Experiment (LDEX) designed and built by CU-Boulder. LDEX charted more than 140,000 impacts during the six-month survey launched in September 2013. NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California was responsible for spacecraft design, development, testing and mission operations.

“The LDEX team has been painstakingly analyzing their data since the LADEE mission ended on April 18, 2014,” said LADEE project scientist at Ames, Rick Elphic. “Their results answer one of the big LADEE science questions: is there a dust component to the tenuous lunar atmosphere? And if so, why is it there?”

According to Horányi, the cloud is primarily made up of tiny dust grains kicked up from the moon’s surface by the impact of high-speed, interplanetary dust particles. A single dust particle from a comet striking the moon’s surface lofts thousands of smaller dust specks into the airless environment, and the lunar cloud is maintained by this sometimes predictable process of regolith "gardening."

“Identifying this permanent dust cloud engulfing the moon was a nice gift from this mission,” said Horányi, the principal investigator for the LDEX instrument and lead author of the study. “We can carry these findings over to studies of other airless bodies, like the moons of other planets and the asteroids.”

A paper on the subject appears in the June 17 issue of Nature. Co-authors Jamey Szalay, Sascha Kempf, Eberhard Grun and Zoltan Sternovsky from CU-Boulder, Juergen Schmidt from the University Oulu in Finland, and Ralf Srama from the University of Stuttgart in Germany.

The first hints of a cloud of dust around the moon came in the late 1960s when cameras functioning overnight aboard the unmanned moon lander Surveyor 7 captured bright glow hours ahead of lunar sunrise. Not long after astronauts in lunar orbit described a significant glow above the lunar surface when approaching sunrise, phenomenon brighter than the sun by itself should have been able to produce over a body with only a trace, essentially non-existent, atmosphere.

Because these new findings do not square with the Apollo reports of a thicker, higher dust cloud, conditions back then may have been somewhat different. The dust on the moon -- which is dark and sticky and regularly dirtied the suits of moonwalking astronauts -- was created over several billion years as interplanetary dust particles incessantly pounded the rocky lunar surface.

Many of the cometary dust particles impacting lunar surface are traveling at thousands of miles per hour in a retrograde, or counterclockwise orbit around the sun, the opposite orbital direction of the solar system’s planets. This causes high-speed, near head-on collisions with the dust particles and the moon’s leading surface as the Earth-moon system travel together around the sun.

Monday, June 22, 2015

This is perhaps the premier conference on space resource utilization, space mining, granular mechanics in space, etc. Springtime in Orlando figuring out how to extend human civilization into the solar system - what could be better?

With a low-cost launch, they now have a lander with the potential for precision landings driven by new system on a chip (SOC) technologies developed by Nvidia with help from General Electric.

Astrobotic knows that space and robotics are not that easy, but at a recent Nvidia-sponsored technology conference, the company’s engineers were presenting technologies that it argues could ease and accelerate the path to the Moon.

And the company is offering anyone — including their X-PRIZE competitors — a ride to the Moon. Safely on the surface they propose a civilized Mad Max road race to the finish line – 500 meters away – the winner taking the $20 million grand prize.

To make their moon mission a reality, the company is blending an interesting mix of old and new into their lander design, the Griffin Lander.

The new includes the Nvidia Tegra K1 chip used initially in its Jetson dev kit. The old is none other than General Electric designing the custom boards based on Tegra K1 and low-cost computer boards they hope will be recognized as a better, cheaper, alternative to existing radiation-hardened electronics costing millions. The Nvidia dev kit costs little more than $300.

Tapping their own wiz-kids from Carnegie-Mellon, Astrobotics is using laser-guided imagery that was developed to compete for the DARPA Grand Challenge for autonomous vehicles. For Astrobotic, the convergence of all of this tech is designed to get them beyond just the Google Lunar X-PRIZE but much more.

Monday, March 16, 2015

North is to the left, west below in this animation showing what is almost certainly an impact and its plume (right) on the lunar surface in Mare Nubium, on the morning side of the terminator, February 26 [Marco Iten/GLR Group].

Marco Iten

Raffaello Lena

Stefano Sposetti

Geological Lunar Research Group

Report from Selenology Today Preliminary Report 2015:Abstract: We report the detection of an interesting luminous event most probably generated by a meteoroidal impact on the lunar surface occurred at 21h 35m 22.871s ± 0.010s UT, the 26 February 2015. The position of the flash was along the terminator at selenographic coordinates 7.9° ± 0.6° W; 26.1° ± 1.6° S. The brightness of the flash 0.16 s after the initial detection was +8.0 magV. After the main lightdrop a successive residual diffuse light lasted for several seconds.

Under the assumption of a meteoroidal impact we argue that this post luminous event and its ever growing dimensions was likely caused by the sunlight reflection on ejected materials released by the impact. Thus, future high resolution orbital data, e.g., from LRO spacecraft (NAC images) could allow the detection of this crater. Because this event was captured only by one observer, we checked for satellite glints and evaluated the likelihood of a meteor hitting head on our atmosphere.

1. Instruments observing methods, location The detection was made by Marco Iten from Gordola, Switzerland. He used a 125 mm refractor with a focal length of 800 mm. He also used an 8bit Watec 902H2 Ultimate videocamera working in CCIR mode with these settings: Gamma = OFF; BLC = OFF; AGC = LO. A GPS time inserter (KIWIOSD) printed the Universal Time with millisecond precision in the video frames. The software Virtualdub was used to record the AVI file in a hard disk, with Huffyuv video compressor.

Iten's observatory is located at:

Lat: 46d 10m 44s North

Long: 08h 52m 29s East

Alt: 215 m

Stefano Sposetti was simultaneously filming the Moon from its observatory, but the lunar region where the flash occurred was outside its field of view.

Here some informations about the Moon at the detection instant, accordingly to sky simulator software TheSkySix ®.

Equatorial 2000:

RA: 05h 23m 27s

Dec: +17°44'32"

Horizon:

Azim: 250°41'00"

Alt: +41°21'54"

Phase (%): 62.19

Air mass: 1.51

Moon angular diameter: 0°30'33"

Moon distance (km): 3.910 E+05

Artificial satellites: We checked for artificial satellites in the field of view using the website http://www.calsky.com.

The satellite Molniya 340 (21196 1991022A) was at an angular distance of 32 arcmin from the Moon center at the time of the detection. We exclude that this satellite caused the detected flash in Iten's avi.

Luminosity evolution

From the very beginning of the event to +0.14 s (the first seven 20 msfieldintegrationtime) the intensity of all, or at least some, of the pixels is saturated.

The angular sampling of the individual images composing the video file is 2.4 arcsec/pixel. We noticed a non circular increase of the light source, therefore we calculated its augmentation with respect to x and y components (Fig. 4). The apparent radius of the Moon is almost parallel to the x axis.

At the location of the event, the absolute sampling of the image (normal to the moon radius, ie. of the y axis), is 4.5 km/pixel (on the lunar surface). The absolute sampling of the image in the x direction has to be multiplied by a factor 1.24 (= 1/sin 54°) i.e. to 5.6 km/pixel.

At time +6.62 s the x and y diameter of the external border of the “lightcloud” are about 10 pixels and 12 pixels, respectively. This translates to an effective length on the lunar surface of 54 km and 56 km.

If we assume that the increase of the light source is due to the ejected materials elevated from the bottom and if this cloud has a circular shape relative to a tangent plane to the surface, then the mean speed of the augmenting radius is about 4 km/s.

The increase of the lightsource is showed in figure 5 and in some animations we posted at

A visual inspection of the “lightcloud” in the video animation confirms that the expansion lasted until +10s. This translates to a circular effective diameter of about 80 km.

Selenographic Lunar coordinates

The coordinates of the detected flash are determined to:

Long: 7.9° ± 0.6° West

Lat: 26.1° ± 1.6° South

in Mare Nubium, near the crater Lippershey P, located to the south of Birt crater.

The analyzed image displays lunar features that were of very low contrast on the dark limb of the imaged lunar surface. Thus, after alignment with the edge of the lunar disk, computation of the libration, and overlay of the rotated Moon's surface matching the image generated by a simulated image obtained with the LOLA DEM, a coordinate map was superimposed. This procedure was performed using the LTVT software package by Mosher and Bondo (2006). Generating an elevation map of a part of the lunar surface requires its three dimensional (3D) reconstruction. Recently, a global lunar digital elevation map (DEM) obtained with the Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter (LOLA) instrument on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) spacecraft has been released. It has a lateral resolution of 1/64 degrees or about 500 m in the equatorial regions of the Moon http://pdsgeosciences.wustl.edu/missions/lro/lola.htm

Hence, the rendered image obtained using LTVT and the LOLA DEM, assuming the same illumination conditions and librations of the observing session, was saturated allowing a close comparison with the appearance of the saturated terminator as seen in Fig. 2, and further refined considering the uncertainty comparing the map with the WAC imagery of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.

We report this luminous event as an “unconfirmed lunar flash” being considered an impact candidate. In fact, considering that the event was only recorded by one video camera the possibility of a meteor "headon" producing the recorded light cannot be ruled out. Therefore we tried to evaluate the post spread of light as being emitted by the ionization of the high altitude gases of our atmosphere. Sometimes luminous meteors leave luminous trails and in this chapter we try to discard this possibility. We got the direction of the winds and their speed using the website

In this study, and under the assumption of an impact event, the same formalism and equations as in the works by Bellot Rubio et al. (2000), Ortiz et al. (2000), Ortiz et al. (2002), and Carbognani (2000) was followed, including the kinetic energy that is translated into impactor mass assuming a typical sporadic impactor speed. According to the statistics of a large meteoroid orbit database (Steel, 1996) this speed is approximately 20.2 km s1 on Earth and 16.9 km s1 on the Moon, after correcting for the different escape velocities of the Earth and the Moon.

Moreover a short routine provided by Melosh and Beyer (1999) was used to evaluate the scaling equations to determine the diameter of a crater given details on the nature of the projectile, conditions of impact, and state of the target. The transient crater diameter is evaluated by three independent methods, yield scaling, piscaling and Gault's semiempirical relations supplemented by rules on how crater size depends on gravity and angle of impact.

The parameters used in the calculation are the projectile density, the target density (2700 kg m3), the impact velocity (16.9 km s1), the peak brightness (5.5 MagV) and the duration of 0.22 seconds. Using the luminous efficiency η = 2 x 103 (the nominal value determined from Leonid impact flashes, e.g., Bellot Rubio et al., 2000; Ortiz et al., 2002), the mass of the impactor would be 1.1 kg. Based on the above data and assuming a spherical projectile, the diameter of the impactor was inferred to be approximately between 9 and about 20 cm considering a bulk density ranging between 0.3 g cm3 (soft cometary material) to 3.7 g cm3 (corresponding to ordinary chondrites). This impactor would strike the target with an impact energy of 1.7 x 108 Joules (4.0 x 108 MegaTons). If the meteoroid is associated as a sporadic source, the impact angle is unknown. We have used the most likely angle of 45° to estimate the size of the crater produced by the impact.

Using the Piscaled law for transient craters, the final crater would be a simple crater with a rim to rim diameter of about 1520 m.

However, considering that the brightness of the detected flash was saturated and the described presence of a luminous post event, the values inferred for the mass of the probable impactor and the crater size originated by the impact could be considerably higher.

Future high resolution orbital data, e.g., from LRO spacecraft (NAC images) could allow the detection of this crater. Hence, it will be interesting to compare LRO high resolution images (NAC images with their resolution of ~1 m on the ground) taken before and after the event. Future studies will be performed to complete our analysis, including the search of the crater, and thus to estimate mass of impact produced dust cloud and the size of exospheric dust particles and to perform hydrodynamic modeling of this event.